Glenn Fleishman’s 14-year relationship with Quicken 2007 finally ended this year. But it took a dead motherboard, an old Mac mini, and a conveniently timed tip for him to break with his accounting software past.
With these utilities from different developers, you can extract text from any image on the Mac or search for text in your photos on either the Mac or iPhone. Text in images is no longer just pixels.
Faced with a need to drive to as many as 43 different spots in the same trip, Adam Engst found a mapping solution that calculated the optimal route and provided stop-by-stop voice navigation on the iPhone.
Sometimes you want to take a screenshot of a dialog that’s attached to a window. It turns out you can do this by pressing Command-Shift-4, pressing the Space bar, and then holding down the Command key when you mouse over the desired dialog.
Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 14 with a new Notes feature that recognizes the extent to which many users keep numerous untitled documents open in BBEdit at all times. The release also provides significant enhancements to source code editing thanks to support for Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol.
Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 365 service promises to let you stream Windows from the cloud to a Mac or iPad. It could be a win for those looking for an x86 Windows solution on an M1-based Mac.
If you’re perturbed by Google’s tracking and profiling based on your searches, there’s a new alternative in town that doesn’t, like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, rely on Microsoft Bing. The new Brave Search provides fully anonymous searches using an independent search index, though it also currently checks its results for quality against Google using anonymous queries.
If you’re a Mac user who wants to turn Google Docs into a standalone app using a site-specific browser, you have at least seven choices. However, as Adam Engst discovered, there’s a great deal of variability in the site-specific browser world, and a number of the options work poorly with Google Docs in particular.
Apple’s watchOS 8 introduces a variety of improvements in health, communication, photos, home automation, and more.
Flexibits, developer of the Fantastical calendaring app and Cardhop contacts app, has released Cardhop 2.0, with core features available for free and new and advanced features as part of the Flexibits Premium subscription that includes Fantastical.
Technology transitions with accounting packages are scary—you don’t want to mess around with your organization’s financial tracking if you can avoid it. With MYOB AccountEdge failing to break through the 32-bit barrier, we at TidBITS chose to move to the cloud-based Xero. After a few initial setup confusions, Xero has given us a fast, modern workflow that makes managing our finances fun.
Apple has officially opened up Find My to third-party devices, including Vanmoof e-bikes, Belkin earbuds, and Chipolo item trackers. Could this presage the long-rumored release of Apple’s AirTags?
Please welcome our latest long-term TidBITS sponsor, Rogue Amoeba, makers of a slate of powerful, easy-to-use audio apps.
If you’d like to enhance your command-line skills—either for your personal edification or to support your career as a Mac admin—you won’t go wrong by picking one of two books: the recently updated "Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal" or the new "macOS Terminal and Shell."
Master the techniques necessary to present slide decks, images, and demonstrations in Zoom by sidestepping limitations in presentation software and learning how to configure some of Zoom’s more fiddly settings.